Root identity–relation identity in Inga Simpson’s Understory: a life with trees

ABSTRACT

Simpson’s memoir Understory: A Life with Trees illustrates significant changes in life writing that align it with transmodernity and its turn to the relational. They become apparent when reading Understory alongside Édouard Glissant’s distinction between root identity and relation identity. In generic terms, the memoir confirms the growing openness to different conventions, in this case those of the botany treatise and the nature essay. Moreover, the work expands limits on a thematic level by foregrounding Simpson’s affinity with trees, a true map of her story of living in a forest in Queensland for ten years. With this other-than-human perspective, Simpson reveals the interpenetration between the two types of identity theorised by Glissant, opting for a complex relational view that does not rule out roots. This paper argues that Simpson has made a number of important discoveries: 1. trees are at the same time rooted and relational; 2. her form of environmental activism requires readjustment; 3. she needs to undo the latinising of botany terms and learn the Indigenous names of trees before she can learn the language of the forest; 4. human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism have to be put in perspective; and 5. lone trees grow taller but die younger.

KEYWORDS:

• Autobiography
• transmodernity
• relationality
• nature writing
• Indigenous Australians
• transcorporeality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. It is significant that, besides being known for her visionary capacities, the saint and Doctor of the Church is considered the initiator of scientific natural history in her country (Jöckle 2003, 204).

2. In the field of fiction, the Australian author Murray Bail also explores alternative forms of relationality with the world of trees, especially in his award-winning novel Eucalyptus (1998), in which the different species of eucalypt trees propel the narrative.

3. The Indigenous Australian scholar Vicky Grieves favours the word “wholistic” over “holistic” since it derives from “whole,” a term “which describes a matter in its entirety,” thus highlighting the radically organic perspective of Indigenous worldviews (Grieves 2009, 1).

4. In 1992, the Mabo legal case was a milestone in the Indigenous fight for sovereignty over their traditional lands since it overturned the myth of Terra Nullius and granted native title to some communities (Rodoreda 2018, 1–2). The issuing of the “Uluru Statement from the Heart” in 2017 by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Delegates shows that, though decisive, the Mabo case did not end the discrimination of Indigenous Australians. The Uluru statement demands “substantive constitutional change and structural reform” in order to help First Australians to regain their ancient sovereignty, based on their sacred link to the land (“Uluru Statement”).

5. Interestingly, Simpson also mentions the scarce attempts in colonial times to protect First Australians and to promote understanding between them and the settlers, like that of Governor Gipps in 1842. Gipps issued the Bunya Proclamation, “prohibiting European entry into bunya country and the cutting down of the trees” (Simpson 2017, 215). According to Simpson, he “seems to have envisioned Europeans and Kabi Kabi living side by side” (215).

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN) (code PID2021-124841NB-I00) and by the Government of Aragón and the European Social Fund (ESF) (code H03_23R).

Notes on contributors

Bárbara Arizti

Bárbara Arizti is Senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of Zaragoza and a member of the competitive research team “Contemporary Narrative in English,” funded by the Aragonese Government. Since 2021, she belongs to the University Research Institute for Employment, Digital Society and Sustainability (IEDIS-University of Zaragoza). Arizti is a specialist in contemporary Australian literature, the relationship between ethics and the novel, Trauma Studies, Memory Studies and Transmodernity. One of her latest publications is the special issue Beneath the Waves: Feminisms in the Transmodern Era for The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms (2021), edited together with her colleagues Silvia Pellicer-Ortín and Silvia Martínez-Falquina.